Nick Arlett, a 73-year-old retired housebuilder, has spent much of the year trying to save London. He helped organize a series of public demonstrations; turned his home into a storage facility for signs and flyers for his movement; and transformed his own vehicles into rolling billboards of public opposition to a threat he sees as basically existential, the plan to charge people who drive heavily polluting cars on city streets. “There’s never been an attack on London like this,” he said in August at a pub near his home in the suburban neighborhood of West Wickham. “There’s never been anything that’s been proposed by our own government that would do so much harm to so many people.”

In 2019, London became the first major city to require people to pay for access to certain roads if their vehicles don’t meet emissions standards, establishing what it calls an Ultra Low Emission Zone, or ULEZ. This inspired some grumbling when initially introduced, but the implementation is now widely seen as a successful, relatively uncontroversial measure to improve local air quality. But even with the wave of populism that inspired the Brexit movement still in the air, city officials weren’t expecting the vitriol that would come when Mayor Sadiq Khan last year announced his plans to expand the zone to suburban areas on the city’s outskirts.